Emergency Exit : Recent Poems by Xhevdet Bajraj

"How does a writer translate war? And when the war is over, how does the individual reconstruct his world from the ruins? Bajraj lives in Mexico, in exile since the war in Kosovo, and a lot of his poetry is equally attentive to both the desire and the loneliness inherent in that fate. -- Ani Gjika (translator) Bajrajs poems capture the troubled voice of the foreigner in a strange land; a place tethered, painfully and inextricably, to the past. Bajrajs Mexico City, populated by fallen angels and the ghosts of the poets war-torn past, is an uneasy place, one in which even the most mundane of activities is tinged with darkness. Visions of violence intermittently break the flow of words, rendered all the more forceful by their sparse simplicity. This selection of short poems, like small windows into a world in which neither the reader nor the poet is entirely at ease, allow us to contemplate the brutal melancholy of war, exile, and their lingering effects. -- Alice Whitmore